DELPHI, Ind. — In what is in all likelihood a preview of the defense strategy for the October double murder trial of Delphi suspect Richard Allen, lawyers representing the man accused of killing Abby Williams and Libby German in 2017 argued motions before Judge Fran Gull today to dismiss the charges against their client, move him to a county jail and sanction the prosecutor for supposedly not turning over evidence in a coherent and timely manner.
On this first day of a three-day schedule in Carroll Circuit Court, Judge Gull said she would take the motions under advisement.
That these hearings are being held at all, and Judge Gull is expected to offer written opinions, would be a marked contrast for the contentious arguments that have pitted the defense team against both the prosecutor and the court ever since Allen was charged in October 2022.
The first Motion to Vacate Safekeeping Order seeks to reverse or modify an original order that saw Allen moved from the Carroll County Jail to the White County Jail to the Indiana Department of Correction’s Westville facility all within the first month after his arrest reportedly for his own protection from other inmates.
Earlier this year, Allen was moved again, this time to the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility south of Terre Haute, some 200 miles away from the office of lead defense attorney Bradley Rozzi.
Rozzi argued that the latest move is a violation of his client’s constitutional rights to counsel, makes it difficult for family and lawyers to visit Allen and subjects him to isolation in a remote location.
Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett, who maintains responsibility for assignment of Allen’s pre-trial detention, told the Court, “I don’t care where he’s at. He can’t be with me.”
Judge Gull said she would take under advisement the request to have Allen moved closer to home as he awaits his October 14th trial date.
The second motion heard today was a plea from the defense to direct the prosecution to provide an improved labeling and search system for the tens of thousands of lines of evidence and documents it has provided Allen’s attorney regarding the investigation into their client, compensate his lawyers for the more than $12,000 it cost them to retrieve a piece of evidence the State said it doesn’t have and force the prosecutor to fulfill discovery in a more timely manner.
“We’ve given them everything we have,” said the prosecution team. “I’ve done everything I can to spoon feed them.”
“We don’t expect to be spoon-fed,” the defense argued, instead calling for the State to abide by rules of discovery.
Judge Gull said she would take the motion under advisement.
But the most enlightening debate took place during the afternoon session when Allen’s defense team trotted out its theory of a 3rd party responsible for the murders of Abby and Libby near the Monon High Bridge outside of Delphi on February 13, 2017.
A theory Judge Gull has so far denied introduction before the jury during the upcoming October trial.
During the morning hearing, Allen’s attorneys recounted how they were forced to travel to Georgia to retrieve a social media post they claim essential to proving their client’s innocence.
Almost immediately after the killings, Libby’s grandmother, Becky Patty, told investigators that the father of Abby’s boyfriend practiced Odinism, a Nordic pagan religion.
Internet sleuths discovered that man, investigated but not charged, had allegedly posted social media photographs of sketches and diagrams of confidential crime scene information online.
When Indiana State Police investigators didn’t have or couldn’t retrieve some of that information, one of Allen’s lawyers traveled to acquire it himself.
The prosecution has claimed that, since the man was never charged with the killings, the sketches are not exculpatory and therefore inadmissible in court.
During a hearing on a Motion to Dismiss the charges against Allen, his attorneys argued that ISP has either intentionally or inadvertently botched the investigation into the Odinism theory.
Attorney Andrew Baldwin introduced into evidence emails between ISP Superintendent Doug Carter and Jay Abbott, who was at the time the Special Agent in Charge of the Indianapolis FBI office. The emails showed investigators were “working very hard” to locate an individual deemed “Suspect #6” in the days after the killings to implicate the father of Abby’s boyfriend and Vinelanders, a group of Odinists.
The defense highlighted contradictions in the father’s story about whether he ever met Abby, the erasure of the recording of his first interview with investigators in February 2017, incomplete records of subsequent interviews, ISP’s decision to not seize his phone and download its information and a failure to inquire about the diagrams and sketches and social media posts linking the practice of Odinism to the murders.
Taking the stand was Kevin Murphy, a retired ISP detective who, along with two other officers, wrote a report summarizing their theory that the father and his Odinist associates should be investigated for the killings.
Murphy said that when lead ISP investigator First Sgt. Jerry Holeman learned the defense team had a copy of the report from Murphy’s group, he shouted in a courthouse hallway, “What the F…is this?” and, “How the F…did they get it?”
On the stand, now-Lt. Holeman testified that the father had been eliminated as a suspect based on an alibi for his whereabouts that day and the video evidence captured on Libby’s cell phone that afternoon as the killer approached the girls on the bridge.
“From the video, Mr. Allen told the girls to go down the hill,” he said.
Despite the proximity of the father’s family to the victims, Holeman said he didn’t think it was important to download information from the father’s cell phone, though investigators had the boyfriend’s cell phone and the cell phones of 100 others.
The hearings this week are in response to defense motions and would not necessarily delve into evidence expected to be brought by the prosecution such as eyewitnesses who allegedly put Allen on the hiking trail that afternoon, a bullet found at the scene that may match Allen’s gun and voice analysis of the cell phone video.
While Baldwin admitted the defense team faced long odds in convincing Judge Gull to grant their motions based on violations of Allen’s 6th & 14th Amendment rights, the hearings are an opportunity for the lawyers to begin sewing the seeds of reasonable doubt that a jury may consider if it should find the State’s case against the defendant less than compelling.
Gull will take that motion also under advisement before reconvening court at 9 a.m. Wednesday and hearing a motion to suppress any statements Allen has made to authorities while in custody for nearly the past two years.
